ONGOING DISASTER
I read with great interest Riley Scanlan’s March 8 opinion piece in The Chronicle Herald, “Lamenting the loss of the Acadian forest that I never got to know.”
I feel for the next generations who will never see real forests like the ones we knew in our youth. It will be a century or more before such forests exist again — but only if we make huge strides in changing how forests are managed in this province.
When I lived in Ontario, I used to carry out stream surveys in the Ottawa area. Each spring, one of the city’s high school teachers arranged to bring about 40 Grade 10 science class students out to survey with a colleague and me. We began each session by asking how many students had ever held a frog, netted a minnow, or picked up a crayfish. It was quite shocking to learn how few had ever had that opportunity.
However, it was entirely understandable given that almost all of the small ponds and brooks in the city were now underground, running through stormwater systems. Where once a youth could watch frogs or minnows in a stream right in their own neighbourhood, now there was nothing. Where once there stood undeveloped forests where children could play right in their own neighbourhoods, there was nothing. Nothing.
I ask: How are young people to learn to love and want to protect forests, streams and wetlands, and all the wild things that live in them when there is nowhere to see and experience them?
Over a decade after moving here to Nova Scotia, I watch helplessly as one Crown land (public) forest after another goes down, transformed into yet another ecological wasteland devoid of birds and other creatures, the soil churned up in readiness to be infested with invasive species such as European Glossy Buckthorn in place of the native plants and trees that should have grown there.
It need not be this way, but we have a Natural Resources Department that seems to take pleasure in refusing to listen to those in our communities who attempt to step on the brakes to prevent this carnage.
We are the same communities so recently subjected to terrifying flooding in the Annapolis Valley, inundated by swollen, raging brooks and rivers fed by the out-of-control runoff from heavily clear-cut Crown lands on the South Mountain above us.
Such a sad world we are creating for our youths, and for all of us here in Nova Scotia. Apparently there is no one in government willing to listen to our calls for a return to sanity. Bev Wigney,
Annapolis Royal